Monday, March 24, 2014

#284 session: moving forward

Yup. Still here, still moving forward.

There are a few new tricks that I've learned, I think. One is a trick that I learned while doing that finger monster tracking exercise. I've been doing my best to be receptive about the way my eyes feel while doing the exercise. When I move the monster to my suppressing left eye side it feels a bit uncomfortable and strange. I should be able to see it very well because it's inches in front of the eye, but I can't because that eye is effectively blind (suppressed at the cortex level--not actually blind-blind).

So I focus on that area quite a bit and I try to focus and see it as much as possible even though it's difficult. Through the week I've been doing that I've noticed substantial improvement in control and the range with which I can look at objects with both eyes. I actually do that exercise for ten minutes now that I've come to the conclusion that it's really doing something valuable for me. I'm going to keep doing that until I've absorbed the exercise so that it's no longer uncomfortable and awkward. It shouldn't feel awkward and it shouldn't be difficult to see something that's right in front of my face!

Another thing that I started doing is about five to ten minutes of anti-suppression Solitaire. I see quite a bit of black, which means that I'm still suppressing quite a bit. It's been a while since I've done anti-suppression exercises like this since I haven't found them to be useful in the past. But I suspect that now is the time that I start doing it because my eye control is much better than it used to be so, in theory, my brain should be able to roll with the exercise better. Before what I think was happening is that I would do the anti-suppression exercises, but because my eye control was pretty bad, I would still get a lot of visual conflict, and so that visual conflict would trigger suppression. One step forward, one step backward. But because now as a result of my much improved eye control, my visual conflict has gone down, I'm thinking that it might be the right time to start doing this type of anti-suppression exercise. One step forward, another step forward, and so on, without the backtracking, is my reasoning and hope.

I do that for about ten minutes followed by playing some Metro 2033: Last Light in stereo 3d. This is by far one of the best games I've ever played, period. It renders in stereo with zero glitches or weird graphical artifacts. The visual quality and atmosphere of the game is on a level that I haven't seen in any other game. To be sure, it is a GPU killer, especially while rendering in stereo 3d. The good thing about playing games in stereo is that they are designed to stimulate the binocular depth neurons, and so they are very good at producing powerful stereo 3d effects--even more than what you'd normally see in real life. So even with someone like me who is stereo-challenged, I can still get a reasonably decent stereo effect as a result of the high power of the stereo cues. So when my eyes improve, the gaming experience improves quite a bit, especially when playing the game immediately after doing anti-suppression Solitaire. It's something to look forward to.